While the Administration is cutting taxes (and thus government revenues), a new report from the Council on Foreign Relations says the country is dangerously unprepared for terrorist attacks. Two members of the panel which issued the report were on the News Hour last night: Senator Warren Rudman and former NSC counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. They …
About affirmative action: Republicans profess to hate it, right? So how come they demand not just equal but favored hiring at lobbying firms? It’s not subtle pressure, either; “hire our side or lose access” appears to be the favored approach for Delay and his K Street Project. Nicholas Confessore has just amplified on this idea …
I used to get compulsive about genre fiction writers. If I found one I liked, I used to buy every new book they wrote. Some of the authors whose books I’ve bought in thrall to this obsession include Alistair MacLean, John D. MacDonald, Dick Francis, Rex Stout, Louis L’Amour, Manning Coles, Robert Heinlein, and E.E. …
Remember Yellowstone National Park? The first national park ever created? The park Batty (go see her photos) just visited? Well, the Bush Administration says that it no longer merits endangered status on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. It was declared endangered in September of 1995 for water, sewage, and mine-related problems. “Yellowstone is no longer in …
As long as I’m talking about labor issues, at the 2003 Outsourcing Conference (man, the name itself offends me), a group of high-tech workers (some with advanced degrees) picketed to protest the loss of jobs to places like India. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these data, but: A recent study by Forrester Research …
Under the radar, the Dept. of Labor wants to reclassify jobs to eliminate overtime pay; the public comment period ends Monday. “In 78 job classifications that the group (that being the Economic Policy Institute) examined out of 257 white-collar occupations, an estimated 8 million workers would lose their right to overtime pay,” including emergency medical …
If the President wants to talk about class warfare, he and his contributors have been firing cannonshots for quite a while, a new IRS report shows. The data, in a report that the I.R.S. released last night, shows that the average income of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers was almost $174 million in 2000. That was …
Amidst all the sound and fury about the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Texas sodomy law, this qualifies as the most hypocritical remark I’ve heard so far (paraphrasing): Ken Connor of the Family Research Council said, on NPR’s All Things Considered, “we are increasingly being ruled by judicial oligarchs, not by the will of …
Here’s a fun game. What ads would Google place on your blog (click and enter your URL), if you signed up for AdSense? (Found over at Buzz Machine). For the record, it thinks Poliglut, HIV/AIDS Resources, Hectoring Hegemons, and AIDS Prevention would be good ones on mine. The AIDS ones probably relate to the link …
Was this just another example of the current Administration’s disdain for the policies of the previous one, or an interagency dispute over who could/should do what, or both? It would appear that the Bushies had a few chances to get OBL prior to September 11, but couldn’t or wouldn’t pull the trigger. WASHINGTON (AP) — …